Every January GISCafe Voice publishes blogs of industry predictions from our readers. This is the second installment of those predictions. This year we have extended the deadline for submissions to January 14th for entries.
Every January GISCafe Voice publishes blogs of industry predictions from our readers. This year we have extended the deadline to January 14th for entries.
Belgian company Orbit Geospatial Technologies (Orbit GT), specialists in 3D and mobile mapping, was recently acquired by Bentley Systems at the Bentley Year In Infrastructure 2019 thought leadership conference in Singapore.
Each year at the Bentley Year In Infrastructure thought leadership conference brings a new dimension to digital workflows. Digital Twins were definitely the order of the day this year, and mobile mapping and some other technologies taking front and center stage in the form of acquisitions.
In September, CoreLogic released their 2019 Wildfire Risk Report that analyzes the top regions, states and metro areas at risk for wildfire damage, including number of at-risk homes and their estimated reconstruction costs. The report also includes a breakdown of 2017 and 2018’s major wildfires, which were quite extensive through the western United States. The report focuses on homes in the western states including Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
Some important facts from the report include (from company materials):
The report found nearly 776,000 homes with an associated reconstruction cost value of more than $221 billion are at extreme risk of wildfire damage.
The Los Angeles, Riverside and San Diego metro areas ranked as the top three high-risk areas, respectively with more than 42% of residences at high-to-extreme wildfire risk.
These regions make up more than 51% of the total RCV of the top 15 metro areas analyzed.
In 2018, the highest number of acreage burn occurred in California (1,823,153 acres burned), Nevada (1,001,966 acres burned) and Oregon (897,262 acres burned).
2018 was a record-breaking wildfire year with 8,767,492 acres burned—roughly equivalent to 74 of the 75 largest cities in the United States combined.
This marked the 6th highest total since modern historical records began in the mid-1900s.
From defense to ISR and tethered drones to highly intelligent vehicle sensors, geospatial developments are critical in the realm of communication of many kinds.
While much defense research and development involves the development of weaponry, this particular effort by Airbus Defence and Space focuses on communication rather than physical intervention.
A portable and autonomous dialogue device from Airbus
Among numerous announcements made this week at Intergeo in Stuttgart, Germany, by Trimble, the new Trimble X7 3D Laser Scanning System was introduced, a scanning system that enables professionals with little or no scanning expertise to capture precise 3D scanning data to produce high-quality deliverables.
With all the uses that have been discovered for GIS, humanitarian demining is one that has not gotten a lot of attention. Land mines and unexploded remnants of war are embedded in the soil and structures of one-third of the world’s developing countries. These abandoned time bombs affect innocent people long after the war has ended, making so many areas uninhabitable.
The FAA estimates that there will be nearly half a million registered commercial use drones in the U.S. by 2022 (FAA 2018 – 2038 Aerospace Forecast).
Drones in construction
Drones, or UAVs or UAS, are being used in the GIS industry for such purposes as military surveillance, real estate, searching for hurricane activity, search and rescue missions, public health and safety, agriculture and in construction and countless other industries. In some cases, drones can provide greater resolution than satellite imagery. Their size and affordability makes them a valuable choice for scientists, power companies, surveyors, military actions and civilians and many others. They are also environmentally friendly and provide a low-cost option for gathering valuable data that can then be fed into a GIS.
Since drones can autonomously collect a vast range of data they are appealing to many use cases. Besides, they are light-weight and high performance. Satellite imagery has provided remote sensing data for mapping, but can often display low fidelity or limited visibility from cloud cover. High precision and accuracy can be achieved with aerial imagery, with planes equipped with high tech remote sensors. Photogrammetry, which makes use of overlapping photos to identify exact measurements between objects, is a useful way of gathering accurate models.
The theme of Esri User Conference 2019 was “See What Others Can’t.” The idea is that with GIS, people have the power to see differently. This was the 39th Annual Users Meeting, and while the meeting attracts close to 12,000 attendees per year, Esri CEO and president Jack Dangermond said that the purpose remains the same as it was when they began meeting with users at a Montessori school many years ago.